A City's Obligation: Jobs, Homes, and Food

Governments are an expression of the community. They are how we organize to enact our will onto a landscape. There is a social contract that they fulfill and upholding is their true purpose. We understand that our capitalist society requires us to work to receive housing and food. This means the city has a vested interest in facilitating work to ensure the population is safe and full. There is a reason why the Romans distributed bread and held circuses to keep the masses from rebelling.

Capitalism demands corporations consolidate and to extract as much surplus value from laborers as possible. This has been exacerbated by the alienation of the worker by the machines of the industrial revolution. Marx speaks on this in the Communist Manifesto. The city can alleviate this by facilitating skilled labour demands with public works. We cannot continue to allow out of state investors and contracted vendors to perform work on our vital infrastructure. This includes the roads and our decaying industrial lands.

There are many services cities can provide that make them more attractive places to live. The Brightline system of Florida is getting expanded into the West coast. Our own GCRTA could support something similar to allow more mobility to Cleveland residents within the city. Why is the city not promoting service improvements and a serious recruitment effort for operators, engineers, and maintenance personnel?

This program would need supported by municipal power. We historically had a few electrical power plant located on South Marginal Road that we blew up in 2017. It was a missed opportunity to train folks who live in our dis-invested neighborhoods to provide electricity to our city. It could have been another prime opportunity to introduce a nuclear conversion to an already built power-plant(we speak of another plant still standing that could get this conversion here). We have sold the lot to a Utah based developer and the land sits unused since its purchase in late 2023. Concentrated recruitment at local high schools/universities would continue to improve the brain drain Cleveland has been mitigating since 2017. It is not enough to attract workers from other areas, but we need to consider educating and training the people who are already living in Cleveland's extensive dis-invested neighborhoods. Painesville has their own municipal power department, why is Cleveland lagging behind our Lake County brethren?

We must get creative to solve the issue of poverty on a city level, as it will not come by way of UBI. There are many folks who live in Cleveland living in poverty and will remain in poverty unless the city claims responsibility for its citizens. Nearly 50% of children are in poverty in Cleveland; we need to stop the bleeding and fast. We have talked primarily around transportation and power, but we cannot forget the importance of feeding these folks. While providing them meaningful jobs will help to improve food insecurity, there will still need to be a concentrated effort on providing market access throughout all neighborhoods. Our market solution must keep the dollars local, or the Dollar Generals, Walmarts, and Whole Foods will continue to extract wealth from these locations until they run dry.